Re: Self-Segregating Morphologies

"Mike S." wrote:
> How much importance do conlangers in general place on self-segregation?
Depends on the conlanger.  Me, I find it dull.  :-)  Long live
ambiguity!  My favorite example from my conlang is the adjective
_lassiasa_ which, depending on context, can be the adjective of
_lalasta_ (bird) _ualasta_ (prophecy) or _plassi_ (cause), thus
"bird-like", "prophetic", or "causal" :-)

To explain, the initial la- ua- and p- of those forms are gender
prefixes, which are thus not part of the stem; "bird" and "prophecy"
were once distinguished also by stress, but by classical times,
contrastive stress had been lost.  Thus, there are two stems _lasta_ and
_lassi_, the suffix -iasa (adjective) when added to a noun ending in -a
causes that a to be dropped (also, -iiasa is simplified to -iasa), and
furthermore, the cluster _sti_ is illegal, assimilating as _ssi_.

In theory, you could have a word _sutailasta_ which would mean either
"Person associated with birds" (a breeder of birds maybe?) or "Person
associated with a prophecy" (A prophecied person perhaps?)  Hmm ... that
might make for a nice ambiguity in their scripture ... :-)

However, Uatakassi *is* pretty self-segregating on the level of words,
based on the intonation patterns of words.  The beginning of all words
is low-pitch, it rises at the stress, which is the second syllable of
the stem, and remains higher till the end of the word; thus, wherever
there's a drop in pitch, that signifies the end of one word and the
beginning of the next.

--
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